Brandon Adcock dot comMy Thoughts, Mostly on Direct Response Marketing

It’s been awhile since I posted something useful, so I thought I would post how I run/optimize my Google Content campaigns.  Personally, I love Google Content, I would run it almost always over Search, if I had to choose.  I haven’t been running it recently, just because I have been focusing on media buys.  However, Google Content is a great source for traffic, usually cheap, when you can get it.

There are 2 kinds of Google Content campaigns, keywords and placements.  This post will focus soley on keyword campaigns.

Campaign Structure

As an example, I will use “Golf Clubs” as the product I am promoting.  I start by creating a content campaign, with search turned off, and choose 1 country.  I like to make countries their own campaigns for tracking purposes.  I make an initial ad group with 50-75 keywords around a loosely related topic like “golf clubs”.  Then I write 2-3 text ads and upload 2 image ad variations in the standard ad sizes.  If you are using tracking/propser 202 make sure to use the {keyword} variable at the end of your URLs.  After this ad group is done, I’d make another ad group for Putters and repeat the ad types.

Bidding

I normally bid very high initially.  This way I am getting impressions, clicks, and developing a history.  After a few days your CPCs will start to fall and you can continue to make optimizations.

Focus on CTR

Your ad CTR is pretty much the biggest factor on what your CPC’s will be.  You need to work on getting your ad CTR as high as possible.  This means writing good, original text ads and making quality image ads.  If you copy everyone’s text/image ads, your CTR will be low or eventually fall off.  You also need to block low CTR sites, which we will get into in a minute.

Landing Page Tweaks

In terms of landing page optimizations for Google Content, you need to have original text or you will get slapped quickly, I try not to use Wordpress for Google Content as I find I usually get slapped faster, but this isn’t always the case for everyone.  In the footer you should have links for the Sitemap, About, Terms, Privacy, and articles pages.  I usually build back links to the site as well before I launch the campaign.  I find if I treat the site like I am going to “SEO it”, it performs much better in Google Content.

Eliminate Underperforming Keywords and Sites

This is the biggest thing for making a campaign successful.  I usually try to let a campaign run for 3-5 days before I start making tweaks.  After about 5 days I start to elimate keywords that aren’t doing well, as well as blocking sites that are performing poorly.  If you use tracking/prosper202 and out the {keyword} variable in your destination URL, then you should be able to track performance of your content keywords.  If you have a keyword that is flat out tanking, eliminate it.  Then run a placement report so it shows by domain, then sort by CTR and elimate all the domains with low CTR.  You are effectively raising your CTR by doing this which will lower your CPC’s and raise your quality score.  I usually eliminate anything under .1% unless it is converting very well.  Also, if you have placements that are not converting well, eliminate them too at this time.

I almost always start my campaigns by blocking sites like gmail.com, myspace.com, and ezinearticles.com.  They tend to really bring you down.  Once you start eliminating sites, you will see a nice drop in CPCs.  I usually end up with several hundred blocked domains in a campaign after a few weeks.

All in all, that is pretty much what I do for content campaigns.  I find the content network to be pretty easy to run/optimize if I am not getting slapped around.

2 days ago, I logged into my Google MCC and noticed that an old Adwords account of mine, which I had not used in months, suddenly had clicks/charges showing. I thought it was funny so I went into the account to see what had accrued charges, figuring that somehow an old campaign came unpaused. What I found was not the case. Someone had hacked my password (I checked, I had no malware/keyloggers on my computer, nor had I been phished) and created a campaign, disguised to look like my others, for cheap airline tickets. I couldn’t believe it.

To make matters worse, it was a really good campaign. The ad groups were tightly themed around certain airline ticket modifiers, and they had multiple ads using DKI. I was actually rather impressed by the layout/structure of the campaign. Luckily I caught the campaign within a few hours of it going live because the hackers had set a daily budget of 4k.

After researching Adswords accounts being hacked, it apparently seems like a common problem. Not to mention that these campaigns always seem to be airline tickets or ringtones (go figure). I submitted a ticket to Google, they were very response and will void the charges to my account.

Moral of the story is, check your adwords accounts often (even old ones), watch out for malware and adwords phishing sites, and change your password semi-regularly. The damage wasn’t bad, but it could have been much worse.

As universal search becomes increasingly integrated with the different offerings of each search engine, top ranking real estate spots will only become more difficult to achieve. It was just a few years ago, that websites only competed with other websites for top rankings, that’s not the case anymore. Now that pictures, videos, news, and soon to be products (not to mention 1 spot guaranteed to Wikipedia) are included, companies and sites must make use of every type of medium they can to achieve rankings.

Eventually Google Product Search (formerly known as Froogle) will be a fully integrated part of the search results. Currently product search is accessible in ways pointed out by the screenshot below.

Read the rest of this entry »

The title of this article says it all. Most everyone knows the order of market share for search engines, even people who are not in the industry. We all know that in terms of search volume Google is 1, Yahoo is 2, and Microsoft is 3. According to my Microsoft rep, their market share is about 13.6%. I believe she said they use comScore data and that comScore rates them slightly lower than others.

This is what I was shown as accurate historical market share for Microsoft. I will say that from what I have heard from Microsoft, they are in online advertising for the long haul. They have many new things coming out and I am really intrigued by several of them. They should continue to see a rise in market share from current changes, but they have yet to integrate the cornerstone of their company, software. I mean Jesus (not literally), the possibilities are endless if they can integrate it properly.

If Live search can be correctly and cleanly integrated into Office, hell just Word alone, it would be a huge boost for them. Can you image the ability to select a portion of text in your word document, right click, and hit search. It would then interface directly into Live’s search results and provide results for the text you selected. That is just one option for implementation, even just a search box in the toolbar area would be a huge improvement for them. I wonder why something like this wasn’t included in the release of office 2007?

Now obviously, I have not taken into account legal ramifications of bundling search in with Microsoft’s products. I am not a legal expert, or really even that knowledgeable about monopoly laws, but I am sure Microsoft could find a way around them. It seems to me that the next large battlefield for search juggernauts will be search integration.

A colleague of mine passed me this study in an email today, I am surprised that I have not seen it before. Nonetheless, it is a very interesting find that anyone in the Search industry should read.

Cornell University did a study of 397 search queries to determine eye tracking patterns for Google results. They used undergraduates students to perform searches in areas related to movies, travel, music, politics, local, and trivia. The picture below is a representation of the results they found.

While this study only covers organic/natural results, not paid, and does not include anything past the first page, I don’t think it would be an outlandish assumption to say that these trends also hold true for those two areas as well. It is obvious from this heatmap image, how important rankings are and specifically being “above the fold”. I would be very interested to see Cornell repeat this study after a few years and see if there is a pattern change of how users look at search results. Maybe users would become accustomed to seeing “spammy” results at the top of the page for certain queries and start to naturally shift focus to lower results. Or, the results could be similar. Anyway, its food for thought.

Link to original study

This article is going to tell you how my company dropped their CPC for branded terms by 50%. Who wouldn’t want to do that? Keep reading.

Before I go on any further, let me clarify for anyone who might be slightly confused when I refer to branded terms, I am referring to search terms with some version of a company’s brand name in it. As a little background, I recently came on board at a Fortune 50 retailer to do SEM work for them. They have been having some internal discussion about whether or not they should be advertising on branded terms because upper management thinks it is cannibalizing organic results. Thats another article I will be posting, the findings from our experiment of Organic cannibalization from Paid Search. Anyway, we see a very high CTR, conversion rate, and ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) for our branded terms, but our CPCs were in the high teens and it was costing a lot.

When thinking about the Paid Ad keywords, it can be thought of just like typical supply and demand. The more players bidding on a keyword the higher the CPCs will be. Because of this, branded terms tend to cost less than others. Have you ever thought you might be driving up your own ad cost? That is exactly what we found with my company. Our brand is very large and so is our paid advertising budget. We spend millions a year on paid search. There was a theory that since we were such a large player for purchasing our branded terms that we might be bidding up our own prices, so to speak. A test was done and our max CPC was reduced to what our average CPC cost was. After this was done, we saw a drop of several cents in CPC price. Then, after we lowered it to the average CPC, it was lowered roughly another 20%. All the while, watching to make sure none of our terms went inactive for search, thus indicating we had gone to low. After lowering it the second time, we had successfully cut our CPC by nearly 50% and were seeing single digit CPC.

To pull it all back together in case my train of thought was off, we realized that our brand power was quite large and that we could lower our branded CPC by simply lowering our bids. I thought the findings were pretty darn interesting. Not to mention the lower CPC allowed us to realize a higher ROAS.

Anyone else seen this before? Also as a disclaimer, I am not taking credit for these results, I actually started a few days after the theory was put in to effect. I just thought I would share our findings.